But I don’t use the auto-grade. I use a red felt-tip pen. And because I was looking at the paper with my own tired, straining eyes, I saw the tiny, trembling letters Leo had written in the margin: “Mr. Vance, I don’t think I can make it to Friday.”
I was thinking about Leo as I sat in the windowless auditorium of the district headquarters. The air conditioning was humming a low, aggressive drone that made the room feel like a meat locker.
On the stage, a man named Dr. Sterling was pacing back and forth. He was our new Superintendent of Innovation. He wore a smartwatch that probably cost more than my first year’s salary, and he spoke with the energetic bounce of a man who had never tried to teach Romeo and Juliet to a room full of hungry, heartbroken teenagers on a rainy Tuesday.
“The future of education is frictionless,” Sterling announced, clicking a remote. A massive graphic appeared on the screen behind him. It showed a student’s head connected to a cloud icon. “With the rollout of ‘Apex-Learning 4.0,’ we are finally eliminating the bottleneck of human delay. The AI assesses proficiency in real-time. It creates a personalized pathway. It frees you, the teachers, from the drudgery of grading so you can focus on… facilitation.”
Facilitation. That was the new word. We weren’t teachers anymore. We were “Instructional Facilitators.”
I looked down at my hands. They were stained with blue ink from my fountain pen. I’m sixty-two years old. I have chalk dust permanently settled in the creases of my knuckles. I’ve taught in this district for thirty-five years. I remember when we had textbooks that fell apart if you opened them too fast. I remember when we had to buy our own fans in September.
But mostly, I remember the kids.
I looked around the room. Three hundred teachers sat in silence. I saw Sarah, a brilliant history teacher, rubbing her temples. I saw David, a math wiz who used to play guitar for his homeroom, scrolling through job listings on his phone under the table. We were all demoralized. We were being told that our intuition, our experience, and our connection to the students were “inefficiencies” to be optimized out of existence.
